[WikiEN-l] Why VFD is vexatious, pernicious and a collossal pain in the neck

[Poor, Edmund W]

I never like the creation of a central page to list prospective
deletions. Admins have deletion power, they should simply use it.

If we need a "guidelines" page, fine. Make a guidelines page, so that if
50 articles a day fail to meet the "worthiness criteria" an Admin knows
to delete them. For example:

* Nothing but a URL to a foreign language website.
* Nothing but graffiti about some school chum of yours: Jack is a prat,
or loves Mary (or maybe even Sam ;-)

Oh, yes, we have that already, don't we? It's called speedy delete ...

I propose something radically different:
* If an article is off to a good start, let it remain a stub. Even help
it along by expanding it.
* If a TOPIC is inappropriate for Wikipedia, tag it and bag it (more
about this below)
* If content is hopelessly poor, but it's a good topic (like graffiti
about a notable person, place or thing) - then blank the page. I believe
this makes it fall below the threshold for "red linking"; stubs under a
certain minimum number of characters appear as "non-existent", right?

Tag and bag:

We should be able to label or "move" articles out of the main namespace,
so that they do not appear to the ordinary reading public. Let's find a
way to do this other than ACTUALLY DELETING each version of the page
from a database table and copying those versions into a "deleted page"
table. That is too much server overhead, I guess.

Just make it "hidden" or something. But let it be visible on some page
(like a category page?) which lists "bad articles" in various categories
and sorted in various convenient ways.

One more thing: voting

Don't say that "voting is astonishingly rare" at Wikipedia, and then
turn around and insist that no page can be deleted (or RETAINED) without
first counting and abiding by the Votes For Deletion. This is
breathtakingly stupid, and we deserve all the bad press we get for it -
and for what it does to the deletion process.

Timing

There is tension between the Process of creating an encyclopedia and the
hurry to present the Product.

* Process => development of new articles, along with continuous revision
(i.e., improvement) of old articles
* Product => the display of finished articles

We also insist on displaying "works in progress", which provides the
tension. I think this is what provides the vector which spreads the
poison which David Gerard was talking about (like mosquitoes carrying
malaria).

Uncle Ed